Friday, May 15, 2009

The Welcome Shore

The fab pianist and song-meister royale Steven Blier programmed the concert. It's the start of summer and time for a musical trip to the shore!

If you've never been to a NYFOS concert, I want to give you a little taste. Here's Steve's paragraph about the John Musto song on the program:

John Musto’s “maggie and millie and molly and may” doesn’t literally have the last word tonight—that honor goes to Sir Noël and his hormonal heroine, Mrs. Wentworth Brewster. But Musto’s song contains the moral of our story. “Maggie” comes from Musto’s 1990 cycle Quiet Songs, which received its premiere with soprano Amy Burton at NYFOS. Four young women go to the beach; three of them find treasures, while one of them has a nasty encounter with a sea creature. (Musto quotes “The Ride of the Valkyries” to portray her distress; he’s not a big Wagner fan.) At the end of the song, the poet says that “whatever you lose/like a you or a me/it’s always yourself you find at the sea.” Musto leaves a brief pause for this thought to sink in before bringing back the nasty sea creature motif.

I would go just to hear Musto's work because I think he's one of the best composers on the planet.

The full text of the songs on the program is here - they'll have copies at the door, but you can appreciate the quality of NYFOS concerts by the care they take to inform the audience about song music and the text.